This provocative volume takes a critical look at how the social sciences and psychology in particular have been applied to the lives of children, particularly in education, parenting, and child welfare. Contributions by senior scholars and promising new voices offer fresh, balanced perspectives on key questions: What role has science played in perpetuating discrimination and inequality among different groups of children? How has science been employed in the politics of program formulation, advocacy, and funding? How has science been used to justify the practices of child professionals? How have parents and children responded to scientific ventures designed to “help” them? Co-edited by a historian of education, a historian of childhood, and a developmental psychologist, this book features: An overview of the last century’s efforts to understand children by means of scientific methods. A cogent examination of how scientific research was translated into programs and policies (such as Universal Pre–K and the No Child Left Behind Act) in response to social needs. Enlightening case studies of the intersection of the child sciences with professional and lay practices, children and families, and social reformers. Voices of teachers, social workers, and other professionals working with children.

Electronic version of 2000 text.

TABLE OF CONTENTS. 1. Basic perspectives: biases and format / S. D. Dixon and M. T. Stein. 2. Setting the stage: theories and concepts of child development / S. D. Dixon. 3. Interviewing in a pediatric setting / M. T. Stein. 4. Designing an office with a developmental perspective / M. T. Stein. 5. The prenatal visit: making an alliance with the family / S. D. Dixon. 6. The newborn examination: innate readiness for interaction with the environment / S. D. Dixon. 7. The hospital discharge examination: getting to know the individual child / M. T. Stein. 8. The special care nursery: unlocking the behavior of the vulnerable neonate / S. D. Dixon and P. Gorski. 9. Five days to four weeks: making a place in the family / P. Kaiser and S. D. Dixon. 10. Five weeks to two months: getting on track / M. T. Stein. 11. Three to four months: having fun with the picture book baby / S. D. Dixon. 12. Five to Six months: reaching out to play / S. D. Dixon, M. J. Hennessy, and P. Kaiser. 13. Seven to eight months: separation and strangers / P. Kaiser and S. D. Dixon. 14. Nine to ten months: active exploration in a safe environment / P. Kaiser and S. D. Dixon. 15. One year: one giant step forward / S. D. Dixon and M. J. Hennessy. 16. Eighteen months: asserting oneself, a push-pull process / M. T. Stein. 17. Two years: learning the rules language and cognition / S. D. Dixon, H. Feldman, and E. Bates. 18. Two and one-half to Three years: emergence of magic / S. D. Dixon. 19. Four years: clearer sense of self / N. Putnam and S. D. Dixon. 20. Five years: entering school / P. Nader. 21. Six years: Learning to use symbols / N. Putnam and M. T. Stein. 22. Seven to ten years: growth and competency / N. Putnam. 23. Seven to Ten years: the world of the elementary school child / R. D. Wells and M. T. Stein. 24. Overview of adolescence / M. E. Felice. 25. Eleven to thirteen years: early adolescence - age of rapid changes / M. E. Felice. 26. Fourteen to sixteen years: mid-adolescence the dating game / M. E. Felice. 27. Seventeen to twenty-one years: late adolescence / L. I. Rice and M. E. Felice. 28. Special Families / R. D. Wells, N. Putnam, and M. T. Stein. 29. Childrens encounters with illness: hospitalization and procedures / M. T. Stein. 30. Child advocacy: a pediatric perspective / M. T. Stein, S. D. Dixon, and J. E. Schanberger. 31. The use of drawings by children in the pediatric office / J. B. Welsh. 32. Books for parents, videos for kids: an annotated bibliography / P. Kaiser, M. Caffery, H. J. Brehm, S. D. Dixon, M. T. Stein, and M. E. Felice.

Conducting ethnographic fieldwork with children presents anthropologists with particular challenges and limitations, as well as rewards and insights. Children: Ethnographic Encounters presents ten vivid accounts of researchers' experiences of working with children across a variety of cultural contexts. Part of the Ethnographic Encounters series, the book offers honest reflections on successes as well as failures and shows that in all cases – even those that 'failed' – anthropologists can learn something about children's position in their social world. Going beyond the usual focus on North America and Europe, the text offers comparative insights into the nature of childhood in different societies. The chapters provide first-hand accounts of fieldwork with children in diverse geographical places such as Mexico, the Ecuadorian Amazon, Rwanda, central India, Thailand, Malaysia, and China. The book provides hope, encouragement and inspiration to anyone planning to undertake ethnographic fieldwork with children and provides important insights to students and researchers working in the growing field of anthropology of children and childhood, in childhood studies, and related fields.

Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education rearticulates understandings of materials—blocks of clay, sheets of paper, brushes and paints—to formulate what happens when we think with materials and apply them to early childhood development and classrooms. The book develops ways of thinking about materials that are more sustainable and insightful than what most children in the Western world experience today through capitalist narratives. Through a series of ethnographic events and engagement with existing ideas of relationality in the visual arts, feminist ethics, science studies, philosophy, and anthropology, Encounters with Materials in Early Childhood Education highlights how materials can be conceptualized as active participants in early childhood education and generators of human insight. A variety of examples show how educators, young children, and researchers have engaged in thinking with materials in early years classrooms and explore what materials are capable of in their encounters with other materials and with children. Please visit the companion website at www.encounterswithmaterials.com for additional features, including interviews with the authors and the teachers featured in the book, videos and photographs of the classroom narratives described in these pages, and an ongoing blog of the authors’ ethnographic notes.

This book is a psychoanalytic observation of five children’s existential encounters in their ordinary life at the nursery. It is among the first within psychosocial literature to go beyond adult experiences and explore the existential in young children’s lives as it plays out in their everydayness in symbolic and sensory articulations and in relationship with others; including with the author as someone who arrived looking for it. The author offers analysis in the form of a writing inquiry into meaning, by means of an on-going movement between the self and the other, the interior and the exterior, and psychoanalytic and existential-phenomenological ideas. This is illustrated through a kaleidoscopic account of May, Nadia, Edward, Baba and Eilidhs’ encounters with nothingness, strangeness, ontological insecurity, death and selfhood as these emerged in the time they spent with the author embodying different forms – from concrete objects to dreams – exemplifying an attunement to existential ubiquity. With its relational ground, this work suggests the potential for adults – including researchers, therapists, trainees, educators and parents – to attune to their own existential encounters as a path to understanding those of children.

Through detailed readings of a wide variety of accounts, debates, and representations, Encounters with Wild Children explores the many different meanings these children were given and the varied responses they elicited. Adriana Benzaquén explains why wild children continue to haunt and fascinate Western scientists and shows how the knowledge they have generated in different disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, linguistics, and sociology, has contributed to the shaping and reshaping of the modern understanding of "the child" and affected the social and institutional practices directed at all children in schools, welfare, mental health, and the law.